Canada's Highway to Hell

(Page 3 of 5)

Unlike the camp workers who openly call Fort McMurray a hellhole, Pearce likes the place, warts and all; she particularly loves the alarmingly blue Alberta sky and the annual Blueberry Festival. She'd like to see a slowdown in development but doesn't expect one. I asked her if ordinary folks really had time to consider the environmental impacts of the world's largest energy project, and she said no. "The average worker is here to work. They want to spend time relaxing and some time with family and friends. There is no time to think of all that."

One place to think about "all that" is on a boat in the middle of the Athabasca River. The 950-mile waterway rises in the Canadian Rockies and courses through the tar sands before emptying into the world's most extensive boreal delta, on Lake Athabasca. Every fall and spring the delta serves as perhaps the largest nesting and rest area for migratory birds in North America. After paddling the river in 1906 all the way to the delta and beyond, the American naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton dubbed the majestic waterway the "Missouri of the North."

During a recent visit I ventured out on the river with John Semple, a trim, fit man in his 50s. Semple arrived in Fort McMurray as a firefighter from a small town in the Northwest Territories in 1976 and has since made his living as an outfitter. He survived an earlier, smaller tar-sands boom in the 1970s but described the current frenzy as unprecedented: "This growth is unbelievable," he said. "Anyone who wants to build a plant can do so." Most young folks avoid the river these days, he told me, because "they're too busy with their heads down and butts up in the sands."

Like most environmental indicators in the tar sands, the river is ailing. Since the 1970s the total summer flow downstream of Fort McMurray has declined by nearly a third. Yet every year the tar-sands operations withdraw 250,000 Olympic-size pools of water from the Athabasca. That's enough water to service a city of two million people. (On average, it takes three barrels of fresh, potable water to make one barrel of oil from the sands.) One company alone, Syncrude, uses enough water each year -- 2.5 trillion gallons -- to supply the needs of a third of the residents of Denver.

David Schindler, a University of Alberta biologist and water ecologist, says he was "rather horrified" to learn that the oil industry withdraws nearly 8 percent of the water in the Athabasca during low- to medium-flow periods. This puts industry on a collision course with climate change, he says. Since 1945 temperatures in the region have climbed by 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, and that increase will soon double. Schindler calculates that global heating has reduced the volume of water running into the basin by 50 percent in the last three decades.

He predicts that projected tar-sands development won't leave enough water in the Athabasca to protect its fish or the waterfowl dependent on the Athabasca Delta. Navigation on the river could come to a standstill too. He charges that neither the Canadian federal government nor Alberta's provincial authorities have collected adequate data on the river. Yet an industry stakeholder group, the Regional Aquatics Monitoring Program, recently reported that "changes in the condition of the Athabasca River up to and including 2005 have been minor."

Semple motored his Whiskey Jack up to the Suncor Mine, the facility closest to Fort McMurray. As he approached the mine site, a dusty, Mordor-like landscape replaced tamarack and spruce. Semple killed the motor and pointed to a high, odd-looking piece of land on the west bank. "This was an island once in the middle of the river," he explained. In the late 1960s, Suncor, a Calgary-based firm originally established by the visionary Pennsylvania capitalist J. Howard Pew, actually rechanneled the river and turned Tar Island into a toxic waste site.

Fred MacDonald, a 72-year-old descendant of Scottish and Cree fur traders, used to hunt duck and moose on Tar Island as a kid. He now lives in a bungalow overlooking the Athabasca River in Fort McKay, an Indian community pretty much surrounded by open-pit mines. Sitting in his kitchen drinking a glass of rat-root juice, an old aboriginal remedy made from a plant favored by muskrats ("It's good for everything"), MacDonald told me how he loved that island. He recalled the days when Syrian fur traders on the Athabasca exchanged pots and pans for muskrat and beaver pelts. Back in the 1920s and 1930s aboriginal families lived all along the river and frequently enjoyed feasts of rabbit and moose meat. They netted jack fish and pickerel all winter long. "Everyone walked or paddled and the people were healthy." Now, he said, very few people bother to travel the river much. "There is nothing in the river. It is polluted. You could dip your cup and have a nice cold drink from that river, and now you can't."

MacDonald, like many aboriginal elders, fears the tar sands are draining the surrounding forest of its life-sustaining fens and bogs. "It's our future source of water and it's drying." And he, like Schindler, can see the impact of climate change every season. Rising winter temperatures, he said, have transformed the once clear ice of the Athabasca into slush.

MacDonald doesn't have much faith that industry or government will reclaim the toxic ponds that surround his home. About 90 percent of the water withdrawn from the Athabasca River for mining ends up behind massive tailings dams or dykes. Covering an area of 30 square miles, nearly a dozen man-made impoundments line both sides of the Athabasca; the largest of them covers more than 7,400 acres.

All these ponds contain polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), naphthenic acids, heavy metals, salts, and bitumen. Scientists have identified more than 500 PAHs, by-products of crude-oil processing, but not much is known about them. Of 25 PAHs studied by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 14 are "probable" human carcinogens as well as potent fish-killers. Whenever migratory fowl land on one of these ponds, they promptly drown in oil. (Mining companies routinely use propane-powered cannons to scare the birds off.)

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